200
PARTISAN REVIEW
sciously and wilfully works out the best solution to the particular
problem. No individual producer thinks "for himself"; on the
contrary, if not one man, at least a small group of top bureaucrats,
"think for all." Trotsky speaks of each individual producer hav–
ing "his own private plan," but Dr. Ley of the Labor Front says:
"There are no longer any private people. All and every one
ar~
Adolf Hitler's soldiers, and a soldier is never a private person."
For many years now, capitalism in every advanced country
has faced two great problems: (
l)
how to overcome the increas–
ingly deep contradiction between the forms of private property and
the socialized nature of large-scale industrial production, enough
to at least permit the survival of organized society; (2) how to
prepare adequately for war, the only way that these internal eco–
nomic contradictions can obtain even a temporary solution. The
two problems are closely connected: war is the supreme test of
any modern nation, for in war its very existence is staked; and
war is a
social
undertaking, demanding far more centralized con–
trol and planning, far more subordination of private property inter–
ests to national interests than peacetime production does; the dis–
organization of the economy characteristic of advanced capitalism
makes impossible the effective prosecution of a modern war. The
only power which can control, if not solve, these contradictions,
whether in peace or in war, is the State power. The economic crisis
which began in 1929 gave a tremendous impulsion to State control
of economy throughout the world. Our own New Deal, for exam–
ple, was forced to take measures which a few years earlier would
have been denounced as socialistic-but which even Wall Street
(as witness the Willkie campaign) today recognizes as permanent
and necessary. But if economic crisis stimulates large-scale State
intervention into the economy, war gives an enormously greater
stimulus. To prepare for a modern war, which demands that pro–
duction be not only raised to maximum capacity but also that it be
directed into new channels and coordinated on a national scale–
to do this, the State power must intervene decisively to free the
objectively 'socialized' instruments of production from the fetters
of archaic property forms. This in turn means that both the bour–
geoisie as a class and also bourgeois property relations increasingly
lose their validity, and a new ruling class, the State bureaucracy,
